My earliest childhood memories of eating out without parents is that of eating Samosas at Chandu Sweets. To be specific, eating two Samosas with two types of chutneys at Chandu Sweets, which was a nondescript, blink-and-you-miss hole in the wall about 10 minutes walk from my house. An open gutter flowed alongside the shop (to be fair, alongside all shops) and the water in the gutter was a deep shiny black-blue-green with bubbles. It was difficult to avoid looking at this beautiful water, just as it is difficult for those who claim to be repelled by blood to have a look at a severed arm, or those who claim to be terrified by horror movies to sit through them anyway.
I am told that Mishra ji is already writing an article about the perfect Samosa, so I will not dive deep into the technicalities of what makes a good samosa. This post is about experiences, and not the product itself.
Chandu Sweets had no signboard. At least none that was visible to a person with normal eyesight. For many years I yearned to find out if the shop really had a name, or if it was a case of ‘its-name-is-whatever-you-call-it’. Like some old servants became Ramu Kaka automatically with the passage of time. Maybe my neighbours called the same shop by the name ‘Swamy Samosas’ or ‘Guddu Snacks’. We would never know. My reluctance to ask the staff about the name only increased with every samosa I ate, after all when you have finished reading the Ramayan, you don’t ask who Iron Man was. Or something like that.
Chandu Sweets’ nondescript nature was compounded by the fact that the shop was made of mud, and blended perfectly with its surroundings – muddy street, muddy drinking water, muddy clothes of its staff and muddy colour of samosas and sweets served there. It was almost invisible and the only way you entered this place for the first time was because someone brought you with them and you did the same with someone else, thereby keeping the chain alive. It is impossible in today’s age of relentless social media promotion to believe that a place that tried its best to be ‘off the map’ actually survived for the number of years it did.
There was no manager or cashier at Chandu Sweets. I never saw any staff either, apart from a grubby looking waiter, who always looked like he had been interrupted in the middle of eating samosas. He was a young chap, unfamiliar with an object called ‘comb’ or a process known as ‘bath’. His pot belly had become big enough to break open a couple of buttons of his shirt, which was already couple of sizes smaller than it should have been. The poor fellow looked poor from every angle, except the samosa filled belly. It existed as a reminder to people like me that if we continued visiting, we would end up like him. He always attended the table with his mouth full, chutney stains near his shirt pocket and never repeated the order, because his mouth was full.
Well, to be fair to him, there was nothing to repeat. The order was the same every time – ‘Two Samosas, crushed. Green chutney on one, tamarind chutney on another. Not to be mixed’.
Upon taking the order, he would disappear into what looked like a cave from outside. This cave had an entrance high enough only for a midget to enter. So the poor fellow would bend every time he disappeared and reappeared with food in his hands. I tried unsuccessfully on multiple occasions to peep inside, but there was no light at the end of the tunnel. This gave the food an air of mystery and therefore added taste. No one knew who was inside, how many people, if any at all. Maybe the restless spirit of some ancient chef was belting orders from inside.
The samosa itself was ordinary. The only reason the experience was memorable was that this shop was the furthest I was allowed to go from our house without supervision, and it was the only proper food my pocket money could buy. Of course there was the feeling that I had ordered food, not mom or dad, but I. All this made me feel like a grown up, although it didn’t seem that the waiter cared much about it. His attitude was “Been there, done it. Next”. His lack of sympathy for my “grown up” pangs was indeed a dampener to the proceedings, after all the whole point was not the samosa or Chandu Sweets or the secret cave but my ego. So after the initial few visits I stopped tipping the waiter. It didn’t have any effect on him, because I noticed that no one else was tipping him in the first place.
As I grew up, I was given a longer rope and my unsupervised range increased from 1 km to 2 km. With this enhanced range I could visit Nandu Kulchay Wala at the Chowk. Initially I went bonkers with the increased freedom and started eating Kulcha Matar every day. It was a sudden and total good bye to Chandu Sweets, which I haven’t visited ever since. Nandu Kulcha was a contrasting establishment to Chandu Sweets. It was a street food stall in a bustling area and it was no secret who was making the food and where. The owner was a malnourished middle aged guy who was likely to sell the last Kulcha before going to bed than saving it for his own dinner, unlike the pot bellied waiter of Chandu Sweets. There was no ambiguity about the name either. The owner’s name was not Nandu. Everyone called it by that name because in pre-independence era there used to be a cinema hall there by the name Nandu Talkies.
The food at Nandu’s was finger licking good, never mind the regular bouts of diarrhoea. My parents got sick of attending to my complaints of upset stomach, so they decided to cut me loose. This may sound counter intuitive, as the natural reaction should have been to put a leash on me. However, the logic was (at least I believed so), that giving me unlimited kms of range would kill the fun and I would stop going bonkers about ordering food alone and feeling like a grown up. The easing of restrictions themselves made me feel like a grown up, and I stopped visiting cheap fast food places regularly. No more upset stomachs and no more Pudin Hara after taste in the mouth. I was now aiming higher. About 2 kms away from Nandu’s was a liquor shop protected by a grill with enough cobwebs to make the whole thing opaque. A small window enough to insert your hand and take out a bottle of liquor was cut open in the grill. The window itself was roughly at tummy level for a person of average height, so you never really saw who was behind the grill. You just shouted your order and plonked the money. In a few moments a hand would appear from behind the grill, with a bottle. Even if it was the wrong bottle, you would keep it. Arguing was not possible with someone you could not see and the crowd made sure you were mercilessly pushed out of the queue the moment a bottle was seen in your hand.
A kulcha in hand is worth more than 2 bottles of beer smashed on your head. It is good to aim high, but one also needs to be realistic. My plans to visit the liquor shop were abandoned after I overheard dad telling mom that underage drinkers need to be hung upside down from the hook on the ceiling in the toilet. It is only when I grew up I realised that there was no hook on the ceiling in the toilet. In fact the toilet had no ceiling because it was an just a makeshift enclosure made using a thin aluminium sheet with a hole in the ground. Yeah, pretty common those days.